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Anyone care to take a guess which airline it will be

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BMI baby?
German carrier?
Existing airline that operates into Stansted?

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Tends to imply a foreign airline, operating from overseas airports, into LTN, perhaps in a similar way to Wizz, but on a much smaller scale. How about Clickair, who were rumoured to be looking closely at LTN a few months back, or Sterling, for the Scandinavian market. No destinations at all currently served from LTN. Italy, massively underserved as well and to a lesser extent Germany. Could be anybody, or no one.......Just have to see if anything transpires in the next few weeks.

Of course they could move airports, but Sterling currently have a large Gatwick operation

I'm thinking Clickair or Vueling (Valencia/Seville/Bilbao?), but it would be great to have more German and Italian routes. For Germany - tuiFly (the link with the thomson base??), not sure who would do Italian routes though. Cant see Sterling changing. Air Berlin could be an option as they have been complaining about the charges at STN.

Well Air Berlin would be a coup, but I can't see it happening. Surely they would want lots of inbound slots in the early morning when there are none available - remember the ill-fated BMi ERJ to Brussels?

Hope to be proved wrong ... but in the meantime let the guessing games continue!

What about bmi?, they have ordered these additional aircraft for lhr will they use the slots for lucrative atlantic routes and move the others up the road.

i would say either flybe or sterling, sterling used to operate xmas flights a few years back maybe just testing the water for future investment? any others in the frame?

Air Berlin posted a pre-tax loss of £28M in Q1 of 2007/08, compared to £21M for the same quarter last year, and so it seems unlikely that it would be prepared to undertake a major upheavel such as transferring its operation from STN to LTN at the present time.

Olney 1 Bravo is correct to remind us that even at LTN, early morning 'peak-time' slots are now becoming scarce (although LLAO could facilitate some limited additional airline ops during the early morning peak hours simply by further restricting corporate flights during this period [but such a move would not find favour with Harrods or Signature] through its slot allocation process with ACDL).

Additionally, any mass migration from STN to LTN might actually prove to be a 'two-edged sword' for LTN if it freed-up peak-time runway slots at STN.


Like others, my money's on another mainland Europe-based airline: but any substantial increase in arrivals into LTN during the 7am to 9am period would certainly put pressure on the already over-stretched London terminal airspace system.

There was an Avanti ATR72 on stand 45 last night at about 7pm, anyone know who that was operating for?

The flight was an ad-hoc through LTN. Sorry unable to say who was onboard they all looked like normal pax

The French Post B737, was that Royal Mail picket line busting, or on an ad-hoc? Was this the EAF charter from Lahr? If so, who or what was it flying and will it be a regular visitor?

Lahr
 

This is a charter programme running from July 3rd to August 16th for Europa-Park Breaks run by Dertour UK. They have shorter programmes running from Manchester and Vienna. Lahr is a former Canadian airforce base in Germany but is now known as the Black Forest Airport.

As to the new rumoured airline coming to LTN (could this be Aer Lingus?????) , what would we like to see route wise?

I would like, Venice, Naples, Valencia, Frankfurt, Copenhagen and Marseille.

Black Forest, one of Wiggins old empire (Manston....)?

Aer Lingus coming to Luton, well not in my lifetime, not unless they assumed into Ryanair.

Sky Europe
 

Looks like that the new airline is SkyEurope:
Luton - Bratislava/Prague/Poprad/Kosice

Is it just 3 / 4 new routes?

Looks that way. Are Sky Europe transferring ops from STN then, or are these additional routes to be run along side STN. PRG won't please TOM & Bratislavia against easy(VIE) will be a 'no contest'.

SkyEurope
 

If they are moving from STN - looks like an expansion too as they only ops Bratislava and Poprad from there?? Didn't SkyEurope originally plan to ops from LTN on start up but then changed to STN at the last minute?? Can't find anymore news about this one?

Looking at the Sky Europe website, it looks as though they plan to transfer entirely from Stansted to Luton. They currently only operate from STN to Bratislava and Poprad (but I'm sure they used to be a bigger user of Stansted), so will be adding Prague and Kosice.